How Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Form R Reporting Works

We determine whether you have to file, calculate your releases, and file the report. We do it every year, on time, with the calculations documented well enough to stand up to an inspection.

The report is the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) report, EPA's annual report on toxic chemical releases. Form R is the full reporting form, and Form A is the shorter one.

What we do

Threshold determination. We establish whether you are covered at all, and for which chemicals, and we put it in writing because this is the part that draws the closest scrutiny. → Form R applicability: who has to file

Release calculations. We use mass balance (what came in against what went out), emission factors (published or site-specific release rates) and engineering estimates. EPA's rules require you to keep the basis for each estimate, so we document it. → How we calculate releases

Preparing and filing Form R and Form A through TRI-MEweb, EPA's online reporting system.

Arizona state filings. We file the Toxic Data Report through myDEQ, the state's online system, on the same July 1 deadline. The Pollution Prevention Plan comes later: it is prepared, implemented and filed with ADEQ, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, by December 31 of the following year (A.R.S. § 49-963(D)). → Arizona's state requirements

Reports for missed years, and support if you disclose the gap to EPA. → Missed the deadline?

Supplier notification (EPA rule 372.45). This is the obligation that applies to you even when you do not have to file Form R yourself. You owe a notification when all of the following are true:

• Your facility is in the manufacturing industry codes, SIC 20 to 39.
• You manufacture or process a listed chemical.
• You sell a mixture that contains it to a facility covered by the reporting rules, or to someone who in turn sells to one.

The notification goes out with the first shipment of each calendar year.

Since the October 31, 2023 rule, these notifications have no lower limit on concentration for chemicals of special concern. The rule removed the de minimis exemption from supplier notification for every chemical on EPA's list of chemicals of special concern, which covers the persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic (PBT) chemicals and the PFAS chemicals alike. It is the one genuinely new restriction that rule created. → Supplier notification

How we scope the work

Three factors determine the size of the project:

• How many facilities you have
• How many chemicals are involved
• How good your records are for what ran through the plant and what left as waste

A facility with one chemical and clean purchasing, inventory and waste shipping records is one kind of project, while a facility with many chemicals that has to reconstruct four past years is a very different one.

Each year after the first usually takes less work, because the threshold determination and the calculation methods both carry forward, although the data does not. We will give you a written scope of work before anything starts.

What you get from working with us

A small firm, where you deal directly with the person doing the work. We are sized for manufacturers with one facility or a few, and most of this work is for them.

Judgment, not only arithmetic. The calculations are the easy part, and the hard parts are determinations like these:

• Is your degreaser better characterized by a mass balance or by an engineering estimate?
• Does the article exemption (EPA's exemption for finished items) still hold at a shop that machines the parts?
• Is an activity "processing" or "otherwise use"? That one classification moves your reporting threshold from 25,000 pounds to 10,000.

Those are the determinations that get questioned in an inspection.

Data you may already have. The release calculations draw on the same data as an air emissions inventory, so if you keep one, you do not gather the data twice.

The Arizona state side, in full. That means the Toxic Data Report on July 1 and the Pollution Prevention Plan filed by December 31 of the following year, both of which are easy to miss if you work only from the federal guidance.

The honest scale of this requirement

This is a narrow requirement: just over 21,000 facilities file across the country, and if you are one of them, you probably know it. If you are not sure, that uncertainty is the thing worth settling, because the threshold determination is the part that carries the real risk.

Penalties run per violation, per day, and the cost of a threshold determination is a fraction of that.

We are an Arizona EHS (environmental, health and safety) firm working across manufacturing, metal finishing and the semiconductor supply chain. If you want to know how many of these reports we have prepared, and in which industries, ask us and we will tell you the number.